Obama Sweetens The Pot Just Don't Look for a Chicken In It

A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage – Herbert Hoover, 1928

President Barack Obama wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Toward a 21st Century Regulatory System, trying to justify his administration's decision to review and rescind Federal Regulations by executive order.

This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It's a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.

Where necessary, we won't shy away from addressing obvious gaps: new safety rules for infant formula; procedures to stop preventable infections in hospitals; efforts to target chronic violators of workplace safety laws. But we are also making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.

In December, he EPA removed Saccharin from the Chemical Hazardous Materials list. Now the President touts Saccharin as an example of a job killing regulation that has been fixed.

You know who manufactures Saccharin these days? China. Saccharin is made from petroleum based organic chemicals and supposedly doesn't help in losing weight either. Saccharin is not just for TAB, it's also used for electroplating.

Even worse, it's unclear if the US removed anti-dumping laws against China for Saccharin, but most U.S. manufacturers were wiped out, with only PMC being around to make the stuff. It's unclear if they are in business.

Bottom line, removing the FDA classification of Saccharin as a hazardous material helps China, not Americans get some damn jobs.

More odious, we have no concrete information of which regulations will be rescinded for this supposed economic growth. Why announce an executive order, with no specifics beyond some artificial sweetening?

What exactly does this executive order mean? Whose pot is team Obama really stirring? If a multinational corporation complains about some regulation and claims it is costing them money, whoops, out comes the scissors and there it goes?

Or does it mean White House For Sale. Remember multinational corporations, the executive branch has executive orders. See something you don't like? For a small campaign contribution nominal fee, we can remove that for you.

Regulations are almost never touted by economists as causing the dire situation of needing over 11 million jobs to get back to 2007 unemployment rates. It doesn't seem the White House will be sifting through regulations looking for those missing jobs either. After all, the jobs are not between those pages. Instead those lost jobs are squished, pressed and stuck in a host of other policies the administration has control over, such as trade and offshore outsourcing.

Pundit propaganda chants Obama has moved to the middle. Multinational corporations and their agendas, with deep pockets for media buys and media spin, is not the center. The political center is that black hole the middle class feel into. Multinational corporations and their agendas is simply not the U.S. middle class or even the real U.S. job creators anymore.

Removing a few regulations some business or sector doesn't like isn't going to create American jobs. It might buy an election, though, a play straight from the 1996 Clinton deregulation playbook. Wow, that helps the U.S. economy and middle class now doesn't it? It gave us the China trade agreement and the deregulation of Wall Street which lead to the 2008 Financial crisis. But who cares? It gave Bill Clinton a second term.

Exactly. GE is notorious for using its deep pockets to buy firms on the cheap, and follow a scorched earth policy of layoffs and outsourcing to help short-term profits.
GE’s share price is down more than half since Immelt took over as CEO. The company’s financial results (including look at any in depth analysis of today's GE earnings headline) show he would do better spending more time in the office (which would, in turn, spare us his economic “vision”).

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I think we can safely call him the Outsourcing President at this point. He put, first thing on his team, Diana Farrell, who is the "offshore outsourcing" queen.

There are a bunch of (cough) Academic "papers", which declare "outsourcing is good for America".

Contained within them are statistical flaws, major, equation manipulation, data manipulation and absurd assumptions from not on this planet.

These go up all the way to NBER. I think it's debunking time. It's very difficult to point these out, but we have LaTex (mathematical display language) on this site for a reason.

I'll work on this but on the political end, the political lies to the American people are coming think and heavy.

Now we've seen three major state dinners, touting offshore outsourcing agreements de facto as "creating jobs", and Mr. offshore outsource to China put in the White house, Goldman Sachs in the white house...
we have the entire ponzi finance plus only invest in emerging markets globalization labor arbitrage team running the white house at this point.

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I just saw an interesting piece that adds additional insight (and irritation) on offshore outsourcing -

It's by Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Alan Grayson.

"The Federal Open Market Committee releases its transcripts on a five year time lag. Last week, we learned what they were saying in 2005. Dylan Ratigan blogged an interesting catch: Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher expressed his frustration about Chinese imports. Not, of course, that there were too many imports, but that our ports weren’t big enough to allow all the outsourcing American CEOs wanted."

It gets worse as we read on. Probably the only jobs GE Immelt and Osellout will create - expansion of our ports

Immelt? Was he the guy who said there was ""no downside" to GE stock price when it was at $33? Wasn't he CEO of GE when he said the $1.60 dividend was safe, then cut it to 40 cents a share? My (now 96 year old) mother had 4,000 shares in her retirement portfolio -- She sold a thousand of them at 38, then she still saw the rest plummet. I wouldn't trust this guy to wax my car!

Now the question is "Should we trust a president who would name this guy to advise him on matters financial?"

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I think this is all about more "NAFTA" style offshore outsourcing deals, pure and simple. The spin is worse than Bush who was worse than Clinton. It's just unbelievable, they have hollowed out America and left the American people in the dust.

Which is pretty much what I wrote in the post, it's no accident that the U.S. largest offshore outsourcing destinations are getting state dinners on U.S. China. (pun intended).

And to your point, these revolving door CEOs, i.e. they fail at one company and magically pop up at another, not even by corporate performance and shareholder standards are many actually competent, are literally in charge of the country, giving themselves fat bonuses as they fire every American who isn't in their Friday night poker game and offshore outsource, now the most advanced technology transfer in history...to foreign nations. Right o, just give what is left away and oh yeah, give free/cheap money too so banks will ship that also right out of the country as "investment".

I feel all of those WWII vets, the great generation who built up this country just rolling in their graves.

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Of those who haven't bought the farm by now (how much of a farm could be bought today with those $10,000 life insurance policies? -- I still have mine, though I can't explain whjy) -- how many are subsisting on cat food and waiting for SS check to arrive? I guess the joke is on them, and on us too -- the Greatest Generation put their lives on the line to defend our way of life, and we followed them ready to defend our industrial democracy -- our system -- only to see it raped by corporate and financial oligarchs. Kind of reminds you of the Russians stripping Germany of industrial plants during the post WWII occupation. Substitute American jobs for factories and the comparison is apt -- rape by any other name. But then, multinational corporations have no loyalty -- kind of makes you nostalgic for Huey Long and Eugene Debs.

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Folks, just a reminder, the series, that's the SMC, the FMN and the Saturday around the Internets are all open threads. Whatever you want to talk about, or use it to quote some outrage, or fact you want others to see.

This is an FYI, and the pattern could make one dynamite post. i.e. poison our dogs, poison toothpaste, drywall that poisons the home, the list goes on and on...

so now we have toxic fish being imported. No inspections, no home country regulations.

You're eating that 6 eyed Wally. Just came out in the last couple of weeks that fish and you cannot even tell where it came from, much of it is loaded with toxins, chemicals, mercury.

We have a lot of people on this site and most don't want to write full bore articles (understood, it's a LOT of work!), That said, most everyone has great things to say and be aware of.

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